The Web has become a part of daily life, and yet web accessibility remains an important issue because of continuing accessibility problems involving many web users. Universities utilize the Web for many purposes, and therefore, university Web sites must be accessible for all. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the level of accessibility of Turkish university homepages. A sample of university homepages was reviewed using multiple techniques based on The World Wide Web Consortium suggestions. The results indicated that all university homepages show some accessibility problems. Several recommendations are provided based on the research findings. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.
BT - Universal Access in the Information Society DO - 10.1007/s10209-010-0190-z IS - 1 LA - eng N1 -This paper reports the result of an evaluation of Turkish university homepages' accessibility. It is the first same kind of study using a Turkish university sample. After excluding some new universities, a total number of 77 established universities were found in Turkey and among them 10 universities were randomly chosen as the study sample. The 10 universities were comprised of 6 state and 4 private universities and their homepages were then evaluated according to W3C suggestions. Methods used to test the accessibility comprised of graphical brower testing, text-only browser testing, automated testing and validation testing. Results showed that non of the homepages tested had passed all the accessibility standards. Although most homepages were found accessible for color blindness, still many of homepages could only be viewed with a larger screen. Furthermore, all of the pages were missing some ALT texts for images. Six out of ten pages failed the font size test, indicating that these sites were not font size change friendly. Besides, the research also found that none of the homepages could be navigated without a mouse and most of the search forms could not be accessed by keyboard. Based on these findings, further recommandations were suggested.
N2 -The Web has become a part of daily life, and yet web accessibility remains an important issue because of continuing accessibility problems involving many web users. Universities utilize the Web for many purposes, and therefore, university Web sites must be accessible for all. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the level of accessibility of Turkish university homepages. A sample of university homepages was reviewed using multiple techniques based on The World Wide Web Consortium suggestions. The results indicated that all university homepages show some accessibility problems. Several recommendations are provided based on the research findings. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.
PY - 2011 SP - 101 EP - 110 T2 - Universal Access in the Information Society TI - The accessibility of university web sites: The case of Turkish universities VL - 10 ER -